About the bibliographic databases

Africana Periodical Literature

The Africana Periodical Literature database provides metadata of articles on Africa covering a wide range of topics, from geography, history and anthropology to agriculture, women's studies, medicine and health. It currently (October 2016) contains more than 177,000 records from over 800 journals. The majority of the journals are in English or French. A smaller number is in German, Afrikaans, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese. There is a strong focus on journals published in Africa. More than 41,100 articles have a link to full text, and more than 73,900 articles have an abstract.

The database is updated regularly with metadata of articles abstracted and indexed by the information specialists at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) in Leiden, The Netherlands, which has hosted the database since June 2008.

Africana Periodical Literature as it stands at present is an amalgamation of four separate sources:

the original Africana Periodical Literature database, compiled by Davis Bullwinkle from 1974 to 2008, containing metadata of over 60,000 English-language articles on Africa from over 500 periodicals published worldwide;

the Quarterly Index of African Periodical Literature (QIAPL), created and maintained by the Overseas Office of the American Library of Congress in Nairobi from 1991 to 2011, containing metadata of over 50,000 articles from over 750 mostly scholarly periodicals published in Subsaharan Africa;

since 2015 Pedro Pinto has been contributing more than 2000 records on Portuguese history in Africa, and African Studies in general, and continues to do so.

Subject indexing
The subject field of the Africana Periodical Literature database reflects the history of the database's constitution. When the ASCL, QIAPL and Bullwinkle databases were merged, records were matched and duplicates merged. Records which overlapped with the ASCL database were enriched with terms from the African Studies Thesaurus.

At present (2016) 46 percent of the articles have terms from the African Studies Thesaurus, a structured vocabulary of more than 12,500 English terms in the field of African studies developed and maintained by the ASCL. Most articles currently added to the Africana Periodical Literature database are assigned subject terms from the African Studies Thesaurus.

QIAPL records (1991-2011) have subject terms from the OECD Macrothesaurus for Information Processing in the field of Economic and Social Development. Some use was also made of Library of Congress subject headings.

Origins
The original AfricaBib Africana Periodical Literature database was begun by Davis Bullwinkle in 1974. The titles were chosen from the library at California State University-Chico. Coverage was later extended to materials from Northwestern University and other major university libraries in the United States, as well as the Library of Congress.

By February 2008 Bullwinkle had indexed over 60,000 articles from over 500 English-language and multilingual journals and periodicals that specialized in African Studies or consistently covered the African continent, including ten electronic journals. The titles represented Africana materials published in over 22 nations within North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. A list of the journals and periodicals indexed in the period 1974-2008 is available here.